The Internet is a system of interconnected computer networks, which allows computer systems on the Internet to communicate with each other. Computers may communicate according to certain services such as electronic mail and the World Wide Web (WWW or “the web”). The WWW service is a system of interlinked hypertext documents. Documents on the web can be viewed with web browsers. Web pages, text, images, videos, and other multimedia are all types of media that can be accessed in a web browser. To view a document on the web, a client computer would usually send a request to a web server that is hosting web content. The client computer may identify the requested resource using an identifier such as a Uniform Resource Locator (URL). The web server would respond to the request by sending the appropriate document to the client computer. The client computer can display the document in a web browser. Web pages can be specified in many formats and languages. Sometimes, the web pages may include scripts, which are executable code. Web pages may also be backed by a database. Access to a web page may cause code to be executed on the web server and may cause accesses to a database. Web applications may also be Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) that operate on a software platform such as Flash or Silverlight. An RIA may require installation of the software platform on the client computer, for example by browser plug-in, in order to function.
Search engines assist users in finding relevant documents or other informational content from among a larger corpus. A common application of search engines is to assist users in finding information, documents, and files that are located on a network. A common application of search engines is to assist users in finding information, documents, and files on the World Wide Web (“Web”), which comprises a massive network of Web documents. The user submits a word or phrase he or she is interested in, called a search query, and the search engine seeks to provide a list of high quality Web documents that are relevant to that query. The list of Web documents is usually ranked with higher-quality and more relevant documents appearing first.
The ranking is conventionally done by computerized methods such as examination of the contents of the Web documents or by examining the link structure of the Web documents. For example, a search engine may examine the words on a web document and assign an importance ranking according to how similar or related the words on the web document are to the search query. For example, a search engine may examine the link structure of a web document and assign an importance ranking according to which other documents link to the document and which other documents the document links to. For example, a search engine may assign an importance ranking to a document based on the user's search history. For example, a search engine may assign an importance ranking to a document based on whether the user has previously navigated to and made a purchase from that document.
One problem with search engines is that the methods of ranking documents often do not produce rankings that users believe to be an accurate reflection of relevance or quality. Often, a Web document that users believe to be the highest quality and most relevant is not listed first or second or anywhere near the top of the results list. A second problem is that users who notice this problem do not have a means to fix it so that future users who search for the same query can receive better search results.